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Castles, Concepts and Contexts: Castle Studies in Scotland in Retrospect and Prospect Richard Oram The academic study of Scottish castles was born out of the flourishing of the Romantic tradition in the early 19th century. This academic study had its origins have a century earlier, when some sections of British elite society began to develop an interest in their medieval past. Most discussion of the movement point to Horace Walpole’s house at Strawberry Hill, an eclectic assembly of forms and motifs culled from English late medieval examples built and enlarged over the half century after 1749. Walpole’s passion for the medieval extended into other sections of the arts and he is seen to have had a major role in popularising what would nowadays be referred to as a ‘lifestyle choice’ in an influential and wealthy segment of British society. Their tastes were moulded by and reflected in literature, beginning in 1764 with Walpole’s own medieval fantasy, The Castle of Otranto, and climaxing in 1794 with Ann Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho, which in turn influenced pictorial art and spread a revival of interest in medieval architecture. While the high culture of late Georgian Britain is nowadays broadly represented in popular tradition as stridently Classical, it is important to recognise that alongside the Vitruvian and Palladian images of this public face marched a counter-culture that looked enthusiastically to the pre-Renaissance period for its artistic inspiration. This counter-culture in England found its greatest expression in the ‘Gothick’ fantasy of Fonthill Abbey in Wiltshire, built between 1796 and 1822, designed for William Beckford by James Wyatt, an architect whose style has been described as ‘midway between the rococo fantasy of the early part of the century and the archaeological exactitude of the Victorian age’ 1. In Scotland, taste for the neo-Gothic style had also emerged in the 1740s at Inverary, where Roger Morris and Robert Mylne replaced the Duke of Argyll’s 16th-century house with a symmetrically-planned square mansion with cylindrical corner towers and Gothick details. It was from the 1780s, however, when Robert Adam created a series of striking houses in a distinctly hybrid Classical and Italianate Gothic style, best represented by Culzean in Ayrshire (1777-92), Oxenfoord in Midlothian (1780-85) and Seton in East Lothian (1790), that the castellated tradition fixed itself as the dominant strand in the country-house architecture of the landed nobility. Adam’s mock castellation was just one facet of the emergence of a particular view of Scotland’s medieval and renaissance past which has exerted a debilitating hold over castellology in Scotland down to the present. At the beginning of the 19th century, Scottish historiography began a remarkable period of evolution that lasted into the 1860s, commencing with the publication of David Dalrymple, Lord Hailes’s Annals of Scotland 2, then given added impetus with the publication in 1828 of Patrick Fraser Tytler’s monumental History of Scotland 3. Of these books, although Hailes’s was perhaps the more balanced and historically critical, it was Tytler’s which had the lasting impact in forming a view of the past which characterised Scotland as a violent land dominated by over-mighty magnates and riven with feud and factionalism in which castles were fortresses from which robber barons terrorised the peasantry, strongholds from which foreign oppressors sought to dominate the kingdom, and miserable bolt-holes in which a poverty-stricken minor nobility shut themselves away from the unwelcome attention of thieving neighbours and raiding parties of Highlanders or Border brigands. Tytler’s history was effectively a narrative of a conflict between a centralising monarchy and a regionalist nobility, and of an unsteady climb from barbarity into civilisation. The decisive transition was presented as King James VI’s inheritance of the English throne in 1603 and the resultant exposure of the Scottish nobles to the supposedly more advanced culture of the southern kingdom. This so-called ‘Whiggish’ historical tradition was part and parcel of a political culture of Unionism which sought to present the regal union of 1603 and the parliamentary union of 1707 as purely positive developments which brought a culturally-retarded Scotland into enlightened modernity. Scotland’s independent past was dark and miserable, like the castles which littered its landscape. Rather than rejecting the supposed grimness of their past, the Scottish social and intellectual elites celebrated it, for it seemed to provide historical validation for a series of perceptions of their contemporary Scotland. The turbulent past, for example, had supposedly bred a hardy, warrior people who were the ancestors of the men serving in the regiments which had carved Britain its overseas empire in North America and India in the 18th century and who were currently serving in the wars against Napoleonic France. The proprietor- colonels who raised these regiments on their estates saw themselves as the direct descendents of the warrior-nobility of the medieval past, while their officers were often close kinsmen or members of cadet lines of the family. Command of such regiments was a valuable source of income to the landed nobility and it was in their interest to stress the warrior ancestry of their men, to present them as the finest soldiers available anywhere in Britain and thereby secure the commissions to raise regiments. This was the special contribution of the Scots to the armies of post-Union Britain. Thus was born the romantic myth of the Scottish – and particularly the Highland – soldier as the descendent of generations of Celtic warriors 4. The cult of the Scottish soldier emerging from the mists of the country’s blood-soaked past found its greatest propagandist in Sir Walter Scott, Tory Unionist, politician, lawyer and author. From 1814 onwards, Scott’s novels like Waverley, The Fair Maid of Perth, The Monastery, The Abbot or Redgauntlet, which celebrated Scotland’s past military culture, fixed the image of a society inured to warfare firmly in the perceptions of the educated classes who read his work. It was an image further reinforced by the foundation of several societies dedicated to publishing editions of surviving medieval and early modern primary sources, in which Scott himself was a founding figure. From the 1820s until the 1860s, these clubs published a stream of such work, most of it sponsored by aristocrats 5. Scott was also influential in shaping tastes in architecture and art, his house at Abbotsford in Roxburghshire, built between 1818 and 1824, being highly influential in the development of the new castellated style that became known as Scots Baronial, while his pivotal role in the organisation of King George IV’s visit to Scotland in 1822 helped to cement the Romantic image of the Scottish past firmly in the cultural consciousness of the British monarchy and aristocracy. The ultimate product of his popularisation of Scottish history was the demolition of a genuinely medieval house and its replacement in 1853-55 for Queen Victoria and Prince Albert by the white granite Scots Baronial confection that is Balmoral Castle. Popular enthusiasm for the new Scots Baronial style saw an increased demand from clients in the middle and upper classes for architects to incorporate castellated elements into their designs or to re-castellate older buildings that had been classicised in the earlier 18th-century, such as Blair Castle in Perthshire. A drive for greater accuracy in detailing saw the production of pattern and source books upon which to draw, a trend which climaxed with the magnificent Baronial and Ecclesiastical Antiquities of Scotland, (fig.1) produced by the London-born Robert Billings in four volumes between 1845 and 1852 6. It was not Billings’ intention to undertake an analysis of Scotland’s pre-18th-century architecture, and his work offers only a few summary comments on the dating of individual structures and on the stylistic trends within the surviving buildings 7, but his work heightened awareness of the richness of Scotland’s architectural heritage and can be regarded as marking the beginning of architectural history generally and castle studies particularly as a field of credible scholarly – as opposed to antiquarian - endeavour in Scotland. Billings’ approach was fairly random and driven primarily by identification of the best examples he could find to illustrate particular architectural features, styles and development. A more systematic approach which attempted to present the entirety of the surviving data and to classify and date the structures was the logical progression. The Victorian propensity towards cataloguing, typologising and sequencing, best-known from the museum-cases full of rows of artefacts which demonstrated their morphological development over time, resulted in the most influential study of castle architecture, the truly monumental five-volume Castellated and Domestic Architecture of Scotland, produced between 1887 and 1892 by the Edinburgh-based architects David MacGibbon and Thomas Ross 8. The scale of their undertaking was phenomenal – almost every pre-1700 castle, country house and related building in Scotland was recorded - and architectural historians stood very much in awe of their achievement for the best part of a century, regarding the classification and chronology which they proposed as effectively unchallengeable 9. Their scheme, and more tellingly the timespan